Never mind the big-budget blockbusters, many of the best films have been made
on a shoestring, says Anne Billson

For the price of a singleAmazing Spider-Man 2orX-Men: Days of Future Past, you could make 2000 films like the award-winning Cheap Thrills. For the money it took to make this gripping, pertinent and horrific black comedy, estimated by director EL Katz as around $100,000 (£60,000), you wouldn't even be able to buy a small studio flat in London.

But let's say you too wanted to make a low-budget movie – there are a couple of things you might do to streamline the creative process, even if the results were intended only to amuse your friends and family, or to post on YouTube.

Choose genre

There's a reason so many directing debuts are horror movies. Jeremy Gardner, whose $6000 zombie movie The Battery won a slew of awards at international festivals, says: "I think, with very few exceptions, horror is the only genre micro-budget film-makers can use to sneak past the gatekeepers of the industry. It is the cloak of genre trappings that enables it to find an audience. Almost every massive horror hit in the last 15 years has been carried off by unknowns or journeyman actors. People don't see horror films to see movie stars; they see them to be scared, thrilled, unnerved, affected."

The FFF approach ("faux found footage", as seen in films like The Blair Witch Project, [Rec] and Paranormal Activity) can also lower production costs by making a virtue out of camerawork that looks less than professional – though often it just seems a lazy way of covering up for poorly worked out storytelling or shooting strategies.

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Blue Ruin, another recent low budget film that won multiple awards, is a revenge thriller – another genre that, like horror, provides a strong narrative structure. There are even ways of making cheap science fiction, a genre that used to be associated with B-movies, but that nowadays invariably involves big budgets and expensive special effects. But Gareth Edwards, who directed Godzilla (budget: $160 million) cut his teeth on Monsters (budget: $500,000), a relationship-cum-road movie set against an alien invasion, while Shane Carruth made his time-travel conundrum Primer for a measly $7,000.

Work on your script and characters

In low-budget productions, there are fewer bells and whistles to distract the audience, so a good story and well-written characters are vital. On Cheap Thrills, Katz's cost-cutting measures involved "having only 14 days to shoot, trying to stick with naturalistic lighting, so as not to waste time, and mostly handheld camerawork, another way to just keep things moving. The advice I would give [a budding film-maker] is, no matter what genre you're working with, your script and your characters are the most important thing. Don't rush that element. Make sure that you've got enough outside feedback, spent enough time, and really thought it through, because if you've done a good job, you might be able to secure a real cast, and that will make everything so much easier."

Limit your characters and settings

One of the classic formulae for low-budget film-making is: "Some Characters in a Room". Cheap Thrills, which zeroes in on four main characters in a couple of interiors, shares this characteristic with the directing debuts of Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino – Sex, Lies and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs, both of which cost just over a million dollars, are brilliant exercises in making you forget they're essentially just films about people standing around talking.

When Katz first read David Chirchirillo and Trent Haaga's screenplay for Cheap Thrills, he says: "the initial draft felt like it could be done for less than $200,000, which was ideal for me, seeing as I hadn't really done anything to warrant people giving me much money. During the rewriting of the project I tried to add a couple of locations here and there, so that even though we would ultimately end at the house, a contained place, the audience [would have] the feeling that they'd gone on a journey to get there – the world started out bigger, and then closed in on the characters – versus it just feeling like we were in a low budget film that couldn't afford to shoot in more than one place. I also tried to restrict the special effects to a couple of key moments, so I could do the work practically, and make the moments count."

I sometimes worry that audiences are becoming addicted to big budgets, that soon they will no longer tolerate films without stars and state-of-the-art digital effects, or films that rely on ingenuity and makeshift solutions rather than money. Perhaps the next time you feel like complaining about the quality of the latest blockbusters, you might try tracking down a small independent film instead. Not every low budget film will be as terrific as Cheap Thrills, but it's here that the real leaps of imagination are made – often out of necessity – and you will see and hear things you have never seen or heard before.

Five of my Favourite Low-Budget Films

A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Dick Miller plays a frustrated artist who discovers a gruesome shortcut to successful sculpting and becomes the toast of his local beatnik café. Roger Corman, famed for his cost-cutting measures and for nurturing talents such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola and Jonathan Demme, shot this horror-parody for $50,000 in five days. The following year he recycled the same sets for The Little Shop of Horrors, which cost even less ($30,000) and was shot in two days and one night.

Night of the Living Dead(1968)

George Romero's directing debut was this $114,000 zombie movie (in which the z-word is never spoken) that revolutionised the horror genre and went on to become one of the most profitable independent films ever made. Unfortunately for Romero and his collaborators, the distributors neglected to include copyright information on the print, so the film passed into the public domain and they never made a cent from it. This gave me nightmares when I first saw it, and, unlike a lot of horror movies made nearly half a century ago, it has lost little of its terrifying power.

Halloween (1978)

Pace The Exorcist, John Carpenter's slasher movie is yet more proof that most of horror's most influential hits invariably come from the low budget sector. Made for $325,000 (leading lady Jamie Lee Curtis, then unknown, was paid just $8,000) and shot in 20 days, it features many of the techniques that would soon become clichés in the hands of lesser film-makers (who would also add more graphic violence and gore), and went on to make a small fortune. The psychokiller's trademark mask was a Captain Kirk mask bought for $1.98 and spraypainted white, and the director himself composed the eerie title music.

Mad Max (1979)

The first part of George Miller's dystopic action thriller was shot in and around Melbourne on a budget of $350,000, though (with the exception of its first sequel, Mad Max 2) you'd be hard-pressed to find motorbike stunts more insanely life-threatening than the ones on display here. The van smashed in the film's opening chase was Miller's own, since the production was running out of money. Due to the low budget only leading actors Mel Gibson and Steve Bisley were dressed in real leather - all the other actors playing cops had to make do with vinyl, which tended to split at the knees.

The Low Down (2000)

Talented Jamie Thraves is one of British cinema's most shamefully underappreciated film-makers; unlike the other films mentioned here, his feature debut (the budget was £1,000,000, "but we had to pay union rates to everyone and get the film bonded so about £350k ended up on the screen") is hard to pin down as belonging to any particular genre - unless it's the slacker slice of life. But it's a first-rate evocation of a certain fin de siècle London lifestyle, with a freewheeling New Wave feel and great naturalistic performances from Aidan Gillen and Shaun of the Dead's Kate Ashfield. Further down the cast list is Martin Freeman (who had starred in Thraves' 1998 shortI Just Want to Kiss You) in his big screen feature debut.